The Wisdom of Don Rickles

A few months ago, to surprise a friend on his 50th birthday, I took him to see his “last living hero” — Don Rickles, much beloved in the 1960s and ’70s as “the insult comic.”

Mr. Rickles, who died on Thursday at 90, gave his performance from a wheelchair, crippled by necrotizing fasciitis — “It’s a disease that eats Jews,” he explained. He was like a coelacanth brought up from a bygone geologic era of comedy. When someone in the audience stood up and cheered, fists raised, he snapped: “It’s not a rally, ya Polack. Siddown.” The last time I heard “Polack” used as a generic insult was circa sixth grade; it was like hearing someone called a “jive turkey” again.

When I was a kid, this kind of humor was very much in vogue: “All in the Family,” whose main character was a grouchy, loudmouthed bigot, was the highest-rated show on American TV; Mel Brooks’s “Blazing Saddles,” a crazed fable about a black sheriff in a frontier town, was one of a handful of films in history to gross over $100 million. I, a little suburban white kid, watched sitcoms about poor black people in the ghetto. Perhaps the most improbable part of all this is that there were ever TV shows about poor people.

It seems to me now as if there was a window of just a few years, after the upheavals and victories of the civil rights movement and before the rebranded and gentrified racism of the Reagan era, when racial tensions relaxed slightly, and it felt briefly, exhilaratingly O.K. to make fun of race relations in this country. The fact that Mr. Rickles was able to speak those slurs onstage may be a sign not of his era’s ignorance but of its fleeting liberation. Though let’s bear in mind that I was 8 and possibly not keenly attuned to the sociopolitical zeitgeist.

Ours is a more humorless, censorious age. We now live in fear of being “called out” — the American equivalent of being denounced as a counterrevolutionary, except instead of being forced to wear a dunce cap in the town square, you get called names on the internet. I teach at a liberal arts college, pretty much ground zero for the culture of political correctness. None of my students actually seem to like this inhibiting atmosphere, and it isn’t clear who’s enforcing it, but they all have to live in it.

Not long ago, one of my students was told by some of her classmates in a writing workshop that some of her jokes might come across as, no offense, a little bit “mean.” She asked me after class, earnestly, whether I thought the lines in question were mean. I told her she was not mean but also broke it to her, as gently as possible, that she was funny, and that regrettably it isn’t possible to be funny without, on some level, being mean. Humor is aggression transmuted into laughter; it is not nice, or polite or genteel. It’s always at someone’s expense, even if it’s your own.

Before he was a National Book Award--winning novelist, Charles Johnson drew the funniest cartoons about race I’ve ever seen — I won’t even try to describe my favorites here, because I know it would just get cut. He recently told me that he and his colleagues would never be able to publish that work today without being reviled by the politically correct left. Eavesdropping on some older second-wave feminists at a party, I was scandalized and thrilled by their raunchy, bitter humor about subjects like rape — jokes I can’t repeat in print because they would only provoke outraged comments so predictable I could write them myself.

Activists and artists of their generation had to develop much harsher, darker senses of humor as calluses against the much rougher struggles they endured. As the left has turned its attention to ever smaller, easier, cheaper fights — freedom riding through Facebook filter, resisting mircoaggression wherever it rears its thousand tiny heads, prosecuting semantic crimes against humanity — it seems the only acceptable tone for any discussion of race or gender in America is a solemn rancor.

It seems as if the liberal program of attempting to shame and berate people into being more open-minded and tolerant may have backfired. Listening to interviews with Donald Trump’s supporters during his once-implausible rise, I was struck by how many of them mentioned that they admire that “he’s not politically correct.” This was often a not-unbreakable code for saying he was a refreshingly unapologetic bigot. But it’s still worth noticing that apparently telling people they’re not allowed to say certain things or feel certain ways, that their opinions aren’t just incorrect but morally wrong, does not, after all, make them better people; it makes them hate your guts.

“You’re black, I’m white,” Mr. Rickles said to an audience member. “It’s the breaks.” This line is a direct ancestor of a Louis C. K. bit: “I’m not saying white people are better — I’m saying that being white is clearly better.” The comic duo Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, who have rhetorical dispensation to be funny about such things by virtue of being biracial, like to palpate the touchiest spots in the American racial psyche — playing two upscale yuppies trying out out-black each other at a soul food restaurant by ordering items like cellar doors and human feet, or slaves on the auction block getting increasingly touchy and peeved as they keep not selling. Laughter is a saner, more restorative response to the world’s injustice than self-righteous scolding.

Mr. Rickles’s show that night was weirdly schizoid, alternating between snapping epithets and waxing sentimental about how he loves to make people laugh, his deep love for his mother and Frank Sinatra. The official line was that Mr. Rickles’s pit-bull hostility was a stage persona; his real-life personality was legendarily warm and generous. Of course his insults would never have been funny if he’d actually meant them — his persona is a parody. (Contrast that with alt-right iconoclasts like Milo Yiannopoulos, who confuse authentic bigotry and cruelty with humor.) But all that anger, even if it’s an act, must come from somewhere.

So was Mr. Rickles a bigot or a mensch? The truth, probably, is that he was both. We all are, albeit most of us not in such cartoonishly binary form. Maybe trying to stifle and disown the former makes the latter more brittle and false, more of an act. And maybe it’s venting the former persona onstage, as it were, set off from real life by the quotation marks of humor, that allows us to be more genuinely decent.

Correction:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the writer Charles Johnson. He has won many awards, including the National Book Award, but not the Pulitzer Prize.

Tim Kreider is the author of “We Learn Nothing,” a collection of essays and cartoons.